How To Customize Your Facebook Cover Photo

One of the first things people see when they visit your Facebook Business Page is your massive cover photo. It’s no surprise considering that a Facebook cover photo size is 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall. How can you miss it?

Your Facebook cover photo is one of the most noticeable things on your Page, and it’s a huge value add for your business. You can use it to drive traffic to your website, re-enforce your branding, or generate new leads.

In this article we’re going to give you the tools to take full advantage of your Facebook cover photo. We’re going to cover:

The dimensions of your profile picture must be at least 180X180px to be uploaded, but Facebook will change the dimensions to 160x160px

For best image quality you should try to upload a photo that matches the prescribed dimensions. Here is an image of the dimensions of a Facebook cover photo:

Click to enlarge.

Facebook Cover Photo Maker

The easiest way to create a customized Facebook cover photo is to use our free PowerPoint template. You can download it here.

Here is a video tutorial on how to use it:

Things to Keep in Mind

Add a Call to Action

Adding a call to action in your Facebook cover photo produces real results for your business. We found in a Twitter header test that converting a Twitter header to an advertisement resulted in a ~.07 increase in website hits.

The same concept can be applied to your Facebook cover photo. Make a cover photo that encourages your visitors to visit your website. Put a link to your website in your “About” section. Sit back and enjoy the extra traffic rolling in.

Your Profile Picture

Try not to hide any content behind your profile picture. Profile pictures on Facebook are designed to cover up a section of your cover photo. It would be a shame to spend a lot of time designing a cover photo only to have a critical piece hidden by your profile picture. Be mindful of this.

Make sure that your Facebook cover photo is in compliance with Facebook Guidelines. Some notable things to mention regarding the guidelines:

Your cover photo can not infringe on anyone else’s copyright

You can’t encourage people to upload your cover photo on their personal Facebook pages

Pro Tip: If you’re looking for an image to use then you should check out Flickr’s advanced search. There are a ton of images available in the public domain on Flickr for pretty much anything. This could be a great place to find some amazing visual assets for your Page.

Align Your Images

Cover photos that are image rich on the left-hand side of the page are less aesthetically pleasing relative to cover photos where images are on the right-hand side of the page. This is due to the placement of the profile picture. Check out these examples:

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Both Microsoft and Godaddy do an excellent job with the placement of text and graphics in their Facebook cover photos. Noticed how both brands place their graphics on the right-hand side of the page. Now let’s check out two companies that do a poor job at this…

Click to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

Notice how Boostability didn’t offset their logo to the right-hand side of their cover photo. It doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing, and it will look terrible on a mobile device.

Connexion Point didn’t even bother uploading a large enough picture. You can tell because their graphic is so pixelated. It looks horrible, and their profile picture is hiding their graphic. A big no no.

Don’t make these same mistakes. Align your images on the right-hand side.

Integrate with Profile Picture

One of my favorite things to do with cover photos is to incorporate my profile picture into them. For example, check out my Twitter profile:

Click to enlarge.

When you get creative with your cover photo it catches people’s attention. I recommend looking for ways to do this with your brand.